News of the Wired

The advent of the Internet has prompted endless claims that we are living through an unprecedented revolution in communication, one that has annihilated the concept of distance. Yet the real revolution came with the arrival of the telegraph in the 19th century.

The innovations of Joseph Henry and Samuel F.B. Morse, among others, led to the first telegraphed message in 1844, and by the late 1850s President Buchanan was famously exchanging pleasantries with Queen Victoria. Over 50,000 miles of telegraph wire were strung across the country in the prior two decades, and by November 1861 a transcontinental network was complete.

Lincoln was aware that this new medium had great power as an instrument of both military and civilian communication. The telegraph had allowed him to follow the dramatic developments of the 1860 Republican Convention from his home in Springfield, Ill., and the same medium alerted him to his presidential victory in November. Yet when he took office in March, the telegraph extended only to the Navy Yard and the War Department, not the White House. For several months thereafter the administration had to use the city’s central telegraph office to send its dispatches.

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By contrast, the nerve center of the Union war effort in 1861 was found at the headquarters of Gen. George McClellan, who had actually issued a standing order that all messages were to be given solely to him. Such was the situation in October 1861, when telegrams reporting the disastrous Union defeat at Ball’s Bluff were brought directly to McClellan as he met with Lincoln in the White House. McClellan withheld the news from Lincoln, who later learned of both the defeat at Ball’s Bluff and that his close friend Edward Baker had been killed in action. Such a policy was unacceptable, and Lincoln soon transferred control of the telegraph from McClellan’s headquarters to the War Department.

By the middle of 1862 Lincoln began to use the telegraph as a means to project his authority in both the eastern and western theaters. The telegraph office became his second home, where he spent more time than any other place outside the Executive Mansion, including many long nights waiting for unfiltered messages from the battle front.

Perhaps the most consequential adoption of the telegraph was in journalism. In the late 1840s, the establishment of the New York Associated Press made it possible for member newspapers to share the costs of the new technology in order to gather news. By the early 1850s, content from the A.P. comprised at least two columns of every major daily newspaper, and many readers considered this “telegraphic news” to be the most compelling and urgent part of the paper.

By 1860 the A.P. was distributing its news not just in New York but around the country, and this practice began to transform the very meaning of news. Local papers now had the capacity to report national events to their readers in a timely manner, so that “the news” gradually came to connote not just events, but events happening at almost that very moment. Prior to the telegraph, the distribution of news was regulated by the speed of the mail, but now news was potentially both instantaneous and simultaneous.

The immediacy of the news fed a public frenzy for the latest information. Circulation of New York papers rose by more than 40 percent during the war, and in other areas of the nation by as much as 63 percent. During a major battle, editors could expect to sell up to five times as many copies of their papers. While newspaper reporting remained highly competitive throughout the war, the A.P. came to dominate wire news, and this also served the interests of the Administration. The A.P. had regular access to the president and the War Department, and was given exclusive bulletins and announcements to disseminate to the papers. In exchange, the A.P. gave the administration a way to reach the public in a manner that could be carefully controlled and rapidly disseminated.

Telegraphic news of the war effort stimulated the spread of maps as well as newspapers. Among the most popular were those made by Louis Prang, who had emigrated from Germany in 1850 and built a thriving printing business in Boston. Prang’s initial success came from small prints and cards (including the first Christmas cards), but with the arrival of the war he began to issue maps. And he could do it with lightning speed: within a day of learning of the attack on Fort Sumter, he had all Boston newsstands selling his newly engraved map of Charleston Harbor. Ultimately he sold 40,000 copies.

David Rumsey Collection, San Francisco War Telegram Marking Map. CLICK TO ENLARGE

These were among the first war maps ever printed in America. The most successful was his War Telegram Marking Map, which Prang designed after hearing of the Union plan to invade the Virginia Peninsula. In February 1862 General McClellan confidently ferried thousands of troops to Fort Monroe in Virginia, planning an ambitious assault that would culminate with the capture of the Confederate capitol at Richmond. With similar confidence, Prang announced that his was the most distinct map of Virginia ever created, for he concentrated on the region “where the decisive battles of the Union will be fought.”

Prang was responding to the public’s desire not just for news, but the immediacy of “telegraphed” news. Unlike other battle maps which were issued after the fact, his was designed to follow the march in real time. He issued colored pencils — blue for Confederate forces, red for Union — to mark the advances, retreats and clashes that would be regularly reported by telegraph in any newspaper throughout the Union home front. Rather than waiting for maps to be issued after the battles, Prang enabled the viewer to track the invasion as it unfolded, with both victories but also terrible defeats and missed opportunities.

The map was a success, and went through six editions during 1862 alone. Prang’s innovation reminds us not just of the centrality of the Peninsular campaign, but also that Americans in the 1860s were experiencing a revolution in communication that would come to define modern life.

Correction: This article originally misidentified which color of pencil was used to track which side’s army on Louis Prang’s map. Red was used to track the Union forces, blue to track the Confederate ones.

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